The Hypnosis of Reality

You don’t scroll through the feed: the feed scrolls through you. As algorithms shape desire, the distinction between online and offline no longer exists. And control over our choices is immediate and absorbed without our awareness.

We keep discussing “online” and “offline” as though they were two different places, but reality has already changed its operating code. That distinction no longer exists. We are no longer users of digital platforms: we inhabit a programmed noosphere, where simulation has replaced experience and computation has replaced truth.

This new regime can be called algorithmic hypnosis. It is a system for capturing attention that does not impose content but shapes desire. It does not tell us what to think. It silently decides what we will encounter, desire and fear.

From Tool to Organ

For centuries, technology remained outside the body. We pick up a hammer, then put it down. A smartphone, however, is never put down: it has become an additional sensory organ. We do not “use” the internet; we inhabit it.

This is the stage at which human beings stop observing technology from the outside and become an integrated biological component of it. The nervous system and the algorithm interlock, and the loop closes when our perception of reality depends entirely on the feedback we receive from code.

The platforms have divided up the roles. WhatsApp serves as the nervous system of our relationships: it is where we coordinate family life, friendships, work and bereavement. TikTok is the central mechanism of visual hypnosis. Facebook and Instagram are places where we seek the approval of others. The smartphone no longer mediates between us and the world: it filters the world, organises it and makes it habitable only through the screen.

The Loop That Thinks for Us

The mechanism is easy to describe and difficult to break. It unfolds in three stages.

First, the algorithm collects our data and infers our biases. Then it feeds us a pre-digested reality: the so-called bubble. Finally, our response—a like, a share, a purchase, even a decision not to act—becomes fresh fuel for the system.

The result is an extension of the mind into the cloud, paid for with a loss of autonomy. It is an epistemological hypnosis: we believe we are choosing, but we are responding to a programmed stimulus.

The numbers reveal how deeply this connection takes hold. According to industry estimates based on DataReportal and Sensor Tower data, the average TikTok user spends between 95 and 97 minutes a day on the platform, more than on any other social network. A Boston Globe analysis of a group of users found that those who initially spent around half an hour a day on the platform were spending more than seventy minutes within a few months.

That hour and a half is not leisure time. It is the time the algorithm needs to synchronise with our cognitive rhythms and complete the capture loop. These are sessions of conditioning, not entertainment.

If It Isn’t Indexed, It Doesn’t Exist

The most radical shift concerns the very nature of reality. For years, the philosopher Luciano Floridi has spoken of “onlife” to describe the merging of connected and physical life, and of re-ontologisation: the transformation of being into information. The hypnotic loop takes this transformation to its logical extreme.

Reality is no longer made up of atoms and independent facts: it becomes a real-time simulation. A protest that never reaches social media, pain that no one films, expertise that leaves no digital trace: to the hypnotised consciousness, they do not exist. Whatever is not digitised and indexed disappears.

The Italian Case

In Italy, this scenario carries particular weight. According to the OECD’s 2023 PIAAC survey, 35% of adults aged 16 to 65 fall into the lowest level of reading proficiency, compared with an OECD average of 26%. More than one in three Italians struggles to understand texts that go beyond short, explicit messages.

This is fertile ground for a cognitive hypnocracy: a regime that acts on perception before it even reaches ideas. The term comes from the essay Hypnocracy by the philosopher Andrea Colamedici, published under the name of a fictitious author, Jianwei Xun, and written partly with the help of artificial intelligence. “Hypnocracy is the first regime to operate directly on consciousness. It does not control bodies. It does not repress thoughts,” Colamedici explained to Wired Italia. The story of the book itself—an author who does not exist yet has been widely cited—illustrates the very phenomenon it describes.

The consequences affect democracy. Those who lack the tools to decode a complex text are more exposed to an already filtered reality, making it easier to steer them towards emotional reactions or abstention. Democratic participation and individual sovereignty quietly fade away.

But Italy is also a living laboratory of the post-human noosphere, where narratives emerge without us. Understanding what is happening here means understanding, in advance, what could happen elsewhere.

Control Without Chains

The regimes of the twentieth century needed walls, uniforms and censorship. Algorithmic hypnosis does not. It prohibits nothing and forces no one: all it needs is for us to keep scrolling.

You don’t scroll through the feed. The feed scrolls through you. It is the ultimate form of control: one that needs no chains.